In his article, Occupy the Arts, a seat at a time, NY Times critic Anthony Tomasini (like others) pounced on recent allegations of ‘elitism’ in the arts (growing out of the Occupy movement), decrying that there are loads of free and affordable arts events and that even those organizations that charge $400 per ticket also have cheap seats (and the experience is just as great from the nosebleeds, thank you very much!). Not only do Tomasini and others seem a tad defensive when they fly their Free Tickets Flag in the face of those seeking to raise … [Read more...]

I may be unable to post much the next few weeks as I'm on planes and trains, buried in research materials, visiting friends and family that I too rarely get to see these days, and sprinting to the finish line on a few projects. But I want to take the opportunity to thank Doug Mclennan for the opportunity to launch Jumper on ArtsJournal.com (a gift for which I will be forever grateful) and to thank everyone that has taken the time these past twelve months to read posts, post comments, send emails, Tweet, ReTweet, republish, or otherwise … [Read more...]

What do nonprofit arts people mean when they say ‘the business model is broken’? I’ve heard this phrased decried ad nauseum in the US for at least the past three years. It was a working hypothesis before the economic downturn; now it seems to be a statement of fact. So what model are we talking about? The American ‘nonprofit’ model for the arts? A particular ‘business’ model used by individual organizations? A Stanford business school professor once gave me the following definition: a model is a representation of your beliefs about causality. … [Read more...]

So I've recently made a few changes in my life. In July 2010, I left The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where I had the privilege and joy to work in the performing arts program for six years, and moved to the Netherlands to marry a Dutchman and to work towards a PhD in cultural economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. In addition to my role as a grantmaker, over the past couple years, I (along with others) have been writing and speaking on the larger changes in the cultural environment and ways arts organizations may need to adapt in order … [Read more...]

Diane Ragsdale

Diane Ragsdale is an Assistant Professor in the College of Performing Arts at The New School, where she also serves as Program Director for the MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship. Alongside her post at the New School Diane teaches on the Cultural Leadership Program at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada and teaches a workshop on Cultural Policy at Yale University for its Theater Management MA. She is also a doctoral candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam (in the Netherlands), where she lectured 2011-2015 in the cultural economics and sociology of the arts programs. Read More…

Jumper

About 20 years ago, when I was in graduate school, I came across the following poem:
When an old pond
gets a new frog
it’s a new pond.
I think the inverse also may be true.
I’ve often been the new frog jumping into an old pond. Since 1988, I’ve worked in the arts in the US in various roles … [Read More...]

If you want a quicker read, then you may want to skip the speeches and opt for the article, "Recreating Fine Arts Institutions," which was published in the November 2009 Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Here is a recent essay commissioned by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts for the 2011 State of the Arts Conference in London, "Rethinking Cultural Philanthropy".

In 2012 I documented a meeting among commercial theater producers and nonprofit theater directors to discuss partnerships between the two sectors in the development of new theatrical work, which is published by HowlRound. You can get a copy of this report, "In the Intersection," on the HowlRound Website. Finally, last year I also had essays published in Doug Borwick's book, Building Communities Not Audiences and Theatre Bay Area's book (edited by Clay Lord), Counting New Beans.